ad a certain qualifying bitter in
it. Ever since she had believed him dead, Alec had been so near to her!
She had loved him as much as ever she would. But Life had come in
suddenly, and divided those whom Death had joined. Now he was a great
way off; and she dared not speak to him whom she had cherished in her
heart. Modesty took the telescope from the hands of Love, and turning
it, put the larger end to Annie's eye. Ever since her confession to
Curly, she had been making fresh discoveries in her own heart; and now
the tide of her love swelled so strong that she felt it must break out
in an agony of joy, and betray her if once she looked in the face of
Alec alive from the dead. Nor was this all. What she had done about his
mother's debt, must come out soon; and although Alec could not think
that she meant to lay him under obligation, he might yet feel under
obligation, and that she could not bear. These things and many more so
worked in the sensitive maiden that as soon as she heard Alec and his
mother go to the dining-room she put on her bonnet and cloak, stole
like a thief through the house to the back door, and let herself out
into the night.

She avoided the path, and went through the hedge into a field of
stubble at the back of the house across which she made her way to the
turnpike road and the new bridge over the Glamour. Often she turned to
look back to the window of the room where he that had been dead was
alive and talking with his widowed mother; and only when the
intervening trees hid it from her sight did she begin to think what she
should do. She could think of nothing but to go to her aunt once more,
and ask her to take her in for a few days. So she walked on through the
sleeping town.

Not a soul was awake, and the stillness was awful. It was a place of
tombs. And those tombs were haunted by dreams. Away towards the west,
the moon lay on the steep-sloping edge of a rugged cloud, appearing to
have rolled half-way down from its lofty peak, and about to be launched
off its baseless bulk into

"the empty, vast, and wandering air."

In the middle of the large square of the little gray town she stood and
looked around her. All one side lay in shade; the greater part of the
other three lay in moonlight. The old growth of centuries, gables and
fronts--stepping out into the light, retreating into the
shadow--outside stairs and dark gateways, stood up in the night warding
a townful of sleepers. Not one wou